


light side of the dark

by badacts



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Allison-centric, Andrew/Neil (background), Gen, Katelyn/Aaron (background), Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-06-12
Packaged: 2018-11-03 15:33:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,178
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10970202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badacts/pseuds/badacts
Summary: Allison Reynolds is less a princess than she is her own knight.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter warning for discussion of overdose by medication.

Of all the people she thought might come looking for her after Seth, she isn’t expecting the monster.

“All dressed up with nowhere to go?” he asks. He always talks through his teeth like a rictus grin, and Allison isn’t sure whether it’s an affectation or purely mechanical. Either way, it makes him look like a creepy ventriloquist’s dummy.

“What the fuck do you want,” she says. He just slipped inside the door to the room at Abby’s place she has claimed and closed it behind him, putting his back to it. It’s unlikely that anyone else knows that he is inside the house.

He hated Seth, so he’s not here to pass on his condolences. He’s here with a purpose, and Allison is already halfway through contemplating whether she should choke it out of him before he speaks again.

“Just to talk,” he replies.

“Planning your own overdose?” she asks. “I warn you, I’m not an expert.”

His smile widens. “Ah, Seth. That’s the topic, yes. I’ll skip the advice though.”

She wants to cut the sound of Seth’s name out of his mouth, make him bleed on it. “Get to the fucking point, Minyard.”

“I saw you check his pockets,” Andrew says. “He wasn’t carrying anything to overdose on. Or maybe you missed something. Is that what you’ve been telling yourself?”

That’s exactly what Allison has been telling herself, but she’d die before she admitted that to him. She stares at him in silence instead.

“I don’t think that was your mistake,” he says.

“What,” she says. Nothing about it sounds like a question. It’s a demand.

“I think you shouldn’t have gone out where people could get at you,” Andrew tells her. “You know, wolves can always pick out the weakest animal in the herd. A little bit slow, a little bit tired, a little bit…dependant. In this case, Seth was that animal. And I’m sure even you can guess who the king of the wolves is.”

She can guess, even without that cue.

“You can’t be goddamn serious.”

“I’m not a liar, princess. Kevin says that he warned you. You really should have listened.”

Allison stands up abruptly. There are still metres between them, but she feels like she’s swelling. She isn’t sure what’s filling her, though.

“You’re wrong,” she says. Her voice comes out strange.

“No I’m not,” Andrew replies. He’s still smiling, but his eyes look black in the light. “I don’t have proof. But I don’t need it. Do I?”

Allison doesn’t want to believe him. She also doesn’t want to believe that she wasn’t enough, that Seth lied to her all those times he said she was enough to hold him off of the floor on her own, just by being herself. It sounds like a fairy tale story and she’s always known it. It never stopped her hoping.

“I’ll kill him,” she says. She realises her cheeks are wet. She hates it, but her hands are sparking with potential violence, and she’s too afraid to move them.

“Careful, careful,” Andrew cautions. “You might try, but you’re too pretty to make a martyr of yourself.”

‘Pretty’ out of his mouth is an insult, curling off of his tongue like he wants to take another strip off of her. Or maybe he’s just teasing her, like he thinks she won’t really do it. Like he thinks she can’t.

Something shifts in her. She closes the distance between them without even really realising, putting her hand flat against the door to the side of Andrew’s head. He doesn’t shift at her approach, unbothered. She has seven inches on him, but he is not afraid of her.

“Riko Moriyama doesn’t care about death threats,” he says. “He cares about winning. Seth made it very easy for him to win. Are you going to do the same?”

“I’ve never made anything easy,” Allison replies. It’s true. “You brought him here.”

Andrew looks delighted by this. “Oh, blaming me? Interesting, interesting. I’m not sure if you mean Kevin or Riko, but I can assure you I had nothing to do with either before they turned up here.”

He might be right, but he’s in front of her, still smiling, taunting her. She wants to break him into pieces.

She says, again, “What do you want.”

“I don’t want anything,” he replies. “This is about you, remember? Pretty pampered princess in pink, all too willing to break a nail – and goodness, you look a little broken now. So, are you going to let Riko win?”

She spits in his face. It impacts his cheek, slides down, and he wipes it off with the fabric of his armband without breaking her gaze. She waits, and waits, but he does not move.

After a moment, he laughs. “I won’t hurt you when I know that’s what you want, Reynolds. You’ll have to ask offence to do that for you.”

 

* * *

 

It’s a cheap trick. It works.

Love is sustaining, but in its absence anger works just the same. She walks onto the court a week later, her heart a stone, and never looks back afterwards.


	2. begin

Spring semester feels like a new start.

It shouldn’t do. The Allison who comes back from winter break is no different from the one who left – violent, graceful, stubborn to the bone.

She can’t say the same for her teammates. She hasn’t seen the monster yet, but she thinks he’ll look different now he’s lost that smile. Neil looks like he’s been broken down and pieced back together in very rough fashion, recoloured vibrant where he was dull before. The attitude, though: that’s just the same.

_Have you seen Seth’s banner yet?_

Out on the Foxhole Court, they’ve hung the banners for Spring Championships. They’re in numerical order, which puts Seth’s 6 right beside her own 7.

Looking up at it, she waits for the grief to swell through her like water. Instead in its place she finds determination, like stone.

She doesn’t know how long she’s been there breathing when there’s a tentative knock at the wall behind her. When she looks, Nicky is standing there making an apologetic face. It wears strangely exaggerated on him, and she knows exactly why – where she has forced honesty to the forefront of herself, less a mask than a suit of armour, Nicky wears his emotions like he can use them as padding. She wonders how that works out for him.

“What are you looking at?” she demands when she comes out of the door. Nicky immediately averts his eyes. She hasn’t forgotten him trying to comfort her that first day back, but to her that doesn’t mean much.

“Coach is waiting for you!” he blurts, cheerful but verging on manic out of surprise.

“Let’s go then,” Allison says, and leads the way back to the lounge.

When she walks back in, she gets twin smiles from the girls, Renee’s gentle and Dan’s a whole lot fiercer. Allison slides into her seat, taps her nails on the arm of it, a little light roll of thunder, and then says to Wymack, “Who are we eliminating first?”

 

* * *

 

Allison doesn’t quite understand Dan and Matt’s fixation with their little pet puppy of a freshman, but she understands the bare bones of Neil probably better than any one of them besides perhaps Renee.

There’s something in her than she sees echoed in Neil, in a way that’s different from the other Foxes. The others have fallen into Exy, or climbed for it, or fought, because it makes their lives better. Neil and Allison are the same in a way, but they’re also, she thinks, different.

That’s because Allison’s life would have been so, so much simpler if she’d turned away from the sport and turned back to the life her parents wanted for her. She has a feeling, unconfirmed but niggling, that Neil might be the same.

He comes alive on the court like her, like it’s the best thing to happen to him and like it’s also the thing that might kill him. Echoes, echoes – Allison sees herself in him like her reflection in a circus mirror.

People say she isn’t observant, but they’re hypocrites.

She relied on memory and best guess to buy what she needed for Neil, and she puts the products to use now in hiding the marks on him. The shape of him is lovely under the overgrown hair and bruising, and that’s another circus-mirror moment – he’s been hiding behind obscurity with his brown eyes and hair, the reasons why clear in the bright coldness of his true eye colour and the burn of red in his hair. She hides behind the perfect rich girl image, down to the convertible.

Behind her, Dan is grinding her teeth to stumps. “Why? What did he hope to gain? Why did he do it?”

“Dan,” Renee says, low. “We promised.”

“You promised.”

“To get to Kevin,” Neil says, the movement in his jaw forcing Allison to pause her work. “Did you know? Kevin’s been with the Foxes a year now, but he still has a room at the Ravens’ Nest. Riko hasn’t even thrown away his schoolwork. Interesting, isn’t it? Riko threatens and dismisses Kevin at every turn, but he can’t let go. He’s as obsessed with Kevin as Kevin is with him.

“Now Kevin’s starting to forget him. When we faced the Ravens last October, Kevin cared more about us than he did about having Riko standing at his back. He chose us over them that day, and that’s unforgiveable. Riko is King. He won’t be dismissed or belittled or outplayed. So he took away the people Kevin was leaning on. He wanted us to fear him and to infect Kevin with those doubts.”

Dan snorts and says what Allison is thinking. “What an incompetent asshole.”

To Riko, everyone besides Kevin is a pawn. Allison feels her teeth meet at the idea.

“Thank you,” Neil replies. When Dan looks at him in puzzlement, he continues, “For not asking me if it worked.”

“Of course it didn’t work,” Allison says, before she really thinks about it. “You’re not afraid of Andrew. Why would you be afraid of Riko? He’s just another loudmouthed, spoiled child with anger issues.” _Speaking of hypocrites._ She almost smiles. “Now eyes forward and let me work. I didn’t tell you you could look away.”

The boy is well trained. He turns back to Allison and sits still until she finishes polishing him up. When she offers him a mirror to see her work, he refuses with a shake of his head.

“If you say it’s good, I’ll believe you,” he says.

“Not scared of Riko, but scared of your own reflection?” She crosses her arms, playing up the pity because she knows that will get a rise out of him. They’re Foxes, after all. “You are one messed-up child. You come by that naturally or did your parents do that to you?”

Unfortunately, Dan jumps in before Allison gets her answer. It’s fine – she knows, anyway.

 

* * *

 

At some point they ended up adopting Katelyn into their circle, and Allison can’t bring herself to be mad about it.

Katelyn is just so _pretty_. She’s sweet and smart and smiles like bubblegum, her blonde hair always bouncing in a ponytail. She’s also relentlessly straight, which is a crying shame, but even so she’s much too good for Aaron Minyard.

On that front, Allison has no room to talk.

She does remember them doing the Fox version of holding a vigil, waiting to the monsters to come home to the Tower after their thanksgiving crisis. Katelyn had been there, smiling crooked and terribly, terribly afraid underneath it, and Allison had realised she could barely stand to watch it even as she did.

Allison has never really thought she’d understand someone this well when they aren’t a Fox, but she knows exactly what it’s like to love a boy broken into pieces inside. Katelyn, she thinks, has a much better shot at making this work. Presuming of course that said boy doesn’t end up in prison.

“He has a bit of a short temper,” Katelyn is saying. Today, she’s fearless, perched on a couch cushion on the floor with her legs crossed. She’s doing her nails and the rest of them are sipping virgin daiquiris because they’ve got a game tomorrow. Allison spiked hers, but that’s neither here nor there. “Not with me, of course. Just in general. But, like, a bit of patience wouldn’t go astray, right?”

Allison could say _he’s a recovering drug addict, what did you expect._ She could also say _please dump him immediately._ That would be hypocritical, though, and Allison can recognise the affection creasing Katelyn’s face even as she complains about him.

“Short man syndrome,” Allison says. She sounds sage. She’s never dated anyone under six feet tall in her entire life.

“Maybe,” Katelyn hedges. When she smiles, she dimples. “But god, don’t you love a boy with something to prove?”

 

* * *

 

Allison used to drive a Shelby mustang in metallic blue like a late summer sky, striped white down the body. Then a man leaned up against it at a gas station once and asked her if it was half the ride she must be, and forced her to punch him in the face. She sold it so she could buy her barbie-pink convertible instead, and now when she punches people in relation to the car, it’s the same reason she always punches people: because they underestimate her.

When she comes down to the parking lot and finds her car dented to hell, windows star-shattered and tires slashed deep, it hurts less than she thinks it might. She knows who did this. And, all over again, she’s angry.

“I’m sorry,” Neil says, quietly, to her and Matt both.

“Shut up,” Allison snarls, lip curling. “No, you’re not. You’re not. Have you forgotten who has to paint you back together every morning? If you’d let them steamroll you yesterday after all of this, I would hate you.”

“You told them the truth,” Dan tells him. “It’s not your fault they didn’t like it.”

“I don’t want this fight coming back on you,” Neil says, which is sweet, except for how he should have thought of that months ago.

“Too late for that now. But whatever,” Allison says. “They want to break my toy? So what? I’ll buy another one. Maybe I’ll buy two. Fuck them if they think this will hurt me.”

It’s Renee who squeezes her hand and says, “I’m sorry.”

Allison squeezes back, but doesn’t speak. She’s bubbling over inside, tight-hot with rage, and she doesn’t think she’s covering it all under her usual airhead mask.

It all slips out when Aaron says to Neil, “Seth was a one-off then?”

She sees Neil flinch, violently, his mouth open but nothing coming out of it. That’s the instant before she hits Aaron so hard across the face he staggers backwards.

It’s Andrew that stops her from getting a second hit in. His hand on her wrist drives her arm behind her back, and puts her on her knees. His other hand grabs the back of her neck so hard that when she goes to say something – a curses, not a plea – she chokes.

She wishes just for an instant that she’d accepted Renee’s offer of self-defence lessons. She promises to herself that she’ll do it, presuming she survives this.

Renee’s arms are around Allison, firm, comforting. She’s good at that – comfort, and protection. She’s talking, but Allison can’t really make out the words over her own attempts to breathe.

She does hear, very clearly, Andrew says, “You failed. You should have been faster.”

Allison is going to kill him. She doesn’t care if she has to wait until he’s asleep to do it, or if she dies in the process.

Someone squeezes her hand. She doesn’t know who. Renee says, “Andrew. Give her back to me.”

There’s a lot more talking. Allison just breathes and lets Renee hold her – not that she has a choice.

She can make out Neil’s voice, and then Andrew’s. They’re speaking in German, but she can hear the challenge in Neil’s tone, like a series of dares. She wonders whether they’ll end with her alive or a corpse. Neil isn’t the gambling type, but he is the type to fall on his sword, so – she wonders.

When the death grip on her neck finally drops away she falls into Renee completely, barely catching herself before she goes belly-down on the asphalt.

Renee is whispering into her hair, “It’s okay. You’re alright.”

“I’m going to kill him,” she replies. Her voice is barely more than a whisper, and she coughs over it. She lets Renee help her up and guide her back to Dan and Matt, letting them envelope. When Renee steps away, Allison wants to pull her back, but she doesn’t.

 

* * *

 

She goes after Neil later, getting him alone.

He looks up and finds her there, and she sees very clearly him reach for something to say. “I’m sorry. He didn’t deserve it.”

_He didn’t deserve it_. For some the reason those words out of Neil’s mouth make her stomach turn. After a long moment, she says, “You already said it. If we got what we deserved, we wouldn’t be Foxes.”

He winces. Allison shrugs, because it’s the truth, but she can’t look at him as she admits, “Maybe it’s better like this. If he’d done it to himself, I’d live knowing I’d never gotten through to him. At least this way there’s someone else to take the blame.”

She hasn’t told anyone that. Not even Betsy.

Neil says, “Andrew told you about Riko?”

“I’ve known since it happened.”

She watches Neil think that one through. She’s been watching him carry whatever faint guilt he feels over Seth for months now, seen him avoiding her on purpose, and realised early on that Neil didn’t realise she knew. She thinks Neil will forgive her for not saying so, if only because somehow, at some point – probably when she saw what he himself gave up, after Christmas – she’s forgiven him, too.

“I should have said something sooner. I just didn’t,” Neil says helplessly, “I don’t know how to talk to people about the important things.”

“We noticed.” Allison shrugs, dismissive, though her shoulders ache with it. “You’re a real piece of work. One of these days you’re going to tell me why.”

She’s not sure why she believes that. But she does.

When she goes back out into the living area, Dan and Matt are in the kitchen bickering gently as they make coffee. Renee looks up at her when she comes in, and smiles when Allison takes the middle seat directly beside her. The couch is soft, and their weight makes them fall in together, knocking shoulders. Allison, quietly, relishes it.

She feels worn thin, burned out. But Renee squeezes her hand, just for a second, and for that second things don’t feel quite so bad.


End file.
